Twenty years ago, the Velvet Revolution got under way in Czechoslovakia with a student march that was brutally suppressed by the communist regime, with hundreds of young people clubbed to the ground by police. It's a pattern we have got used to seeing, and when the former president Vaclav Havel sets off along the route of the November 17 March it's worth remembering the Iranian students who are suffering now for the same cause.

The Czech revolution was celebrated this weekend in a number of events in Prague, which I attended with a couple of English friends, Nick Fraser of the BBC and Everyman publisher David Campbell, who as students watched the Soviet clampdown in 1968. Campbell was there for the invasion and was dragged from the path of a Soviet tank by a young man named Oldřich Černý, who later became a noted dissident, a colleague of Havel's and head of the Czech Foreign Intelligence Service. Campbell, Fraser and Černý have been friends since '68.

Forty-one years later, Černý was our host as we sat in an audience of students at the Arts Faculty of Charles University listening to a debate, Freedom and Its Adversaries. When we entered, I noticed the memorial on the wall of the building to the student Jan Palach, who set fire to himself on January 16, 1969, not in direct protest to the Soviet invasion, as is often thought, but to stir his compatriots into action. Almost his last words as he lay dying from 85% burns were: "I wanted to express my disagreement with what is going on here and to make people wake up."

Looking round at the earnest faces of the new generation of Czech students, it stuck me that liberty will always owe youth — if I were to identify one of the real adversaries of freedom it would certainly be student indifference.

I was not in Prague to watch the student march 20 years ago, but in Berlin I watched students climb the wall and right from the start, the marches in Leipzig were fired by student activism.

The debate was fascinating, firstly because none of the participants – the dramatist Tom Stoppard, Adam Michnik, one of the heroes of the Polish democratic movement, Jacques Rupnik, a political scientist , Martin Bútora, a Slovak dissident and diplomat, Timothy Garton Ash, the academic and Guardian columnist, and Andrei Piontkovsky, the Russian scientist and political writer – is frightened to talk about ideas, which is quite a relief when you come from the literal, head-banging political culture of Question Time. Rupnik and Bútora were strikingly good. Both spoke of the political disengagement that followed the revolutions in the east and which is so evident in our own society. Rupnik said:

We opted for the quickest form of a free society after '89 and that was imitation. There was no experiment. We just imitated the functioning market economy. The result is that today we have exhausted that cycle. Our political elites are exhausted.
Not a single new idea. No new people. We are burnt out. We have the institutional shell, but it is hollow.

How familiar that last part seems as we stagger towards a general election in Britain.

Bútora talked about the combination of civic indifference and civic helplessness that has paralysed politics in the new democracies, again something that we know about. There were two specific problems in this "hollowed out politics". First was the failure of imagination that says human beings have certain qualities and one of these is the belief that things can be improved. The second is the failure to join and to become active: "We need islands of positive deviance where we say, 'Please come! Please join!' Together we can achieve much." At this Havel, sitting with Madeleine Albright, clapped enthusiastically. The phrase "islands of positive deviance" sounds like a bit of managerial bullshit but Bútora makes a good point. The revolutions in eastern Europe started with small groups of people who achieved critical mass from very unpromising beginnings.

My one criticism of the session is that no one on the panel spoke about the threat to freedom posed by the deep erosions of personal privacy that are being pioneered by the British government and may come to impact all free societies. Most Europeans have no idea about the advances of the surveillance state here: about such things as a DNA database containing the profiles of a million innocent – often black – people, the number recognition cameras that track our journeys, the 4.5m CCTV cameras on our streets, the CRB checks of 11 million people, the proposals to access data from all our communications and internet usage, the sinister children's databases, the 500,000 people who fell under some kind of official surveillance last year in the United Kingdom.

It's almost too embarrassing to talk about these dirty British secrets in the company of man like Michnik, who spent a total of six years in Polish jails because of his beliefs in liberty and democracy. How could we be so cavalier with our birthright when people like him made so many sacrifices? But at least the chair, Garton Ash, said this: "What is happening in my country, the oldest free country in the world, is that our civil liberties are being eroded in an extraordinary way, like the famous salami – cut for cut. And nobody is really standing up."

Time to wake up. Time for students in Britain to grasp what is happening.